Twitter marriage forum a success

Thursday night’s Twitter forum on same-sex marriage reached more than 20,000 people, and made thousands more individual impressions, with the former NSW premier Kristina Keneally, the Star Observer, New Mardi Gras and Australian Marriage Equality all taking part alongside high profile community members including dancer Ripley Waters, DJs Seymour Butz and Dan Murphy, and puppet drag queen Queen Miss Left Titter.

In her contributions to the forum Keneally urged people to find common ground with supportive people of faith on the issue and warned that civil unions would “undermine marriage for straight families” as well as same-sex couples if introduced instead of full marriage equality.

Keneally tweeted “civil union merely = tolerance not acceptance,” and “civil unions do not afford the easy legal or social recognition that marriage does” in agreeing with other posters.

Keneally also advised that people continue to meet with, call and write to their MPs in a respectful manner, and that rallies needed to be big to be noticed, tweeting, “a political mentor of mine once said “never take a rally seriously if it doesn’t get at least 5000 people””

A common theme amongst tweeters was the important of a big turnout at rallies outside the ALP National Conference in Sydney on December 3 and that work to convince MPs that there was support in their electorates would have to continue until then.

Retweets of posts made during the forum continued to spread virally in the hours following the forum as they moved through wider and wider circles.